So we are waiting for our plane from the great `TO` to Vancouver, and I have managed to catch up on posted all my off line blogs. I thought now what? Well I guess I will blog anew. We should be in Vancouver around 11pm to midnightish. (Pacific Time) I have a very large bottle of rum, an ugly but cheap watch, some of the best trinkets/jewelry that I could find in the off tourist season. Ohhh and cigars I have a few of those as well. I am desperately looking forward to a shower to wash the ocean off me. We did our TTD session and immediately changed clothing and left so I have that salt water crusty feeling going on right now. It and the now peeling sunburn have turned into the sunburn/salt water itch. They are loading our plane in about 20 min so I will go ahead and post some photos.

Photos from our day trip to Caibarién

Photos from our day trip to Caibarién

Man O man it was hot yesterday. We went to Caibarién yesterday and we wandered around a bunch and took some photos but it was so stifling that we were back at the resort by supper time.

It has been really awesome to just drive around Cuba stopping at places and looking at stuff. I am so done with the resorts and the bus tours. I was done with them before I even got here! They are such a poor way to see stuff/people and an even poorer way to take photos of it.

We are just getting ready for the wedding I am also packing for the trip home. Time will be short in the next while for things like packing so I am getting as much done as possible. Josh has taken a much more relaxed approach to the leaving then me and I expect that I will be left waiting. :)

I am just bugging mostly there is lots of time to pack I am just always trying to be super prepared! We are doing our Trash session in the morning before we leave as I think I mentioned so hopefully I will be able to run in to the room change clothing and fire back out to the main lobby to check out.

We wil then hop a bus to the airport and fly out. I totally forgot that when we got her we got off the plane on the tarmac via the stairs, you know like in the old days it was the awesome!! I had fear & loathing quotes running though my head “There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” that sorta thing. Anyway off to return the rental car and for food!

…only not on scooters as planned and this is most likely for the best! The rental place only had two working scooters out of seven that are parked outside, and when he tried to fire them up only one of the two actually worked and I do use ‘worked’ in the loosest terms. I am nearly sure that they would have died somewhere along the 50km causeway leaving us stranded, so I think that another car rental is in order. :)

We are up to all this today because the wedding has been moved to Friday and our Trash Session is now going to be at sunrise at Saturday morning before we leave a little tight scheduling wise but should be no problem if planned correctly.  I am going to pack up as much as possible tonight so I am not rushing at it later. We will also dual shoot the session and then if I don’t have the time to properly back it up I can slit these between josh and I. 

It is hot out today I tell ya! I nearly died at breakfast from the heat! It was brutal hot all night even (we were out on the beach having flash wars in which I am sure I won) so today shouldn’t be much of a surprise.  I will be glad for the air-conditioning in the jeep.

So I would seem that the wedding may be postponed a day or so due to the party being quite ill, so once we have conformation of this we are going to go kayaking or snorkeling or both.  It may though a wrench into our plans to rent scooters and head into Caibarién for a photo wander of wanders on Thursday but we will see If the wedding is pushed till tomorrow then that will still be no problem, we will just have to back for the TTD session that evening. I hope we can get our money back for the Jeep Safari that we had booked for Friday, I am sure that they will be understanding because of the wedding change and everything.  We will find out at 1pm when the tour rep is in.    

Yup so I am up and at them getting ready for today’s wedding and such. It is a gloriously sunny day which is good and bad I suppose! That means it will be hot out but that hopefully also means that it won’t be monsooning out! (it does seem to do one or the other here) So on Monday we decided that we would rent scooters on Tuesday, all fine and good. We reserved them and everything, but when Tuesday rolls in it does so with soak you to the bone in 30 seconds type rain! As josh put it every whiny Vancouverite that complains about the rain we get should have to spend one afternoon in a Cuba style rain. They would never complain again :) This is the sorta rain that is not so conducive to scooting so we instead rented a car, well a jeep type thing. I say jeep type thing only because that is what they called it. It was a Suzuki Jimmy and it did have 4H and 4L but that is really where the similarities to a jeep stopped :) It was a brand new one as well and while it wasn’t an Xterra (which is a pretty high standard to live up to) it was required for some of the roads that we ended up taking! So we got the car and decided to drive somewhere cool like say Trinidad. So using nothing but the large overview maps that are in one of my Cuba books and the maps in the Cuban Yellow Pages, off we went!! The first part was easy as we simply followed along the road that we came in on the bus in back but when we got to the uncharted territory it got more interesting. After circling Santa Clara via the ring road twice we found our turning and off we went! It wasn’t the most direct route but it seemed the most entertaining one again all according to the phone book. We did fantastic at navigating to places the roads weren’t labeled or number on either the phone book maps or the roads, so we confirmed we were on track with the towns that we encountered along the way. Everything was fine until we got to Manicaragua. It would seem that it was there that we exited the town going the wrong way and ended up going the wrong way. Something that wasn’t confirmed until we hit the next town with a sign. I say with a sign because it wasn’t the first town that we came across it was 2 hours of ragged backroads later that we came across Santa Lucia a town with a name on it. It was then that we discovered that we were nowhere near Trinidad and instead near Cabaiguán It was all good really, Trinidad wasn’t really a set in stone destination more of a direction to drive towards. Getting lost gave us a glimpse of Cuba that we wouldn’t have gotten on a tour bus and that was exactly what we were looking for. Once we found our self on the map it was a simple drive back to Remedios and then back across the causeway till we got to the resort that we call home. The rental rep is going to be impressed with the sheer number of KM’s that we put on.

So we are back from an epic road trip that ended up in us being no where near where we wanted to be but it was cool none the less. We ended up on some crazy backroads in the middle of nowhere. Again my time is short so I wont go into detail but on the way to Trinidad we ended up somewhere entirely different.  I will talk all about it at less then 12 CUC and hour.maybe even with a few photos although i really didn’t take many. mostly because i was driving.  I did get josh to drive for a while but that was some what scary so I just resumed driving the rest of the way!!

Here is a speedtest from cuba for all your amusment

So due to epic rain we are abandoning the scooters and have instead rented a little jeep type thing.  We have eaten a hardy meal and we are off to see what there is to see! Don’t worry M We will be careful and all that! We are not really sure where we are going but we are sure to have fun and take lots of awesome photos.

I am sitting here drinking a Bucanro [Cuban beer) and blogging but my Internet is running out quickly so I will be brief that and my keyboard is spanish and i don’t have the rights to change it seems! I am again back in the wonderful land of Cuba! and I will be till the 31st.  I am having a blast and taking more photos. I will actually try to post some of them via flickr and what not when I hit the TO this Saturday! There is a lot of good times to be had here! We are renting scooters tomorrow and we are going to cross the 50km causeway that connects the island and the mainland together.  I some how managed to get epically sun-burnt yesterday so I thought it best to take it easy today! Fun fun

I have really big 80′s rock star hair! We are off to the ocean with goggles, snorkels, and under water cameras to see what we can see. I finally was able to garner some internet time and the like so I was able to let Miranda know via (something more than telling josh to update his facebook) that I have arrived. We were so wiped yesterday that we both managed to crash out around 4pm (Cuba Local Time) and sleep till 8. We have met our couple already and we are good to meet them to talk details and what not later today.

Ok so I know that I have kind of left you all hanging here in terms of the blog! It has been a crazy time and I have been avoiding computers and the like! I got home fine and what not. M, her broken leg, & I have been doing our best to go off on random adventures of the off road variety! So today we decided that we needed to go for a long drive & off we went. Our travels took us on this circle route.

It is such an awesome drive because you get to see so many different landscapes and all relatively close to each other. The Xterra was really awesome on fuel the entire way. We got around 10L/100km or around 28-30 mpg which is more then I though we would get. I do feel a little guilty about the purchase of a gas guzzling truck but being that I scoot everywhere in town and it gets great mileage on the highway i feel less guilty, that and the versa (that wasn’t anywhere near as good on fuel as advertised) wouldn’t survive 1/10^th of the places that we have already taken it.